European Commission
European Soil Data Centre (ESDAC)
Land degradation is the persistent reduction in the capacity of the land to support human and other life on Earth (IPBES, 2018). This process jeopardizes the provision of ecosystem services. The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15, ‘Life on Land’, includes efforts to sustainably manage and recover natural ecosystems and restore degraded land and soil.
Under the umbrella of SDG 15, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has defined an indicator framework to monitor progress toward ‘land degradation neutrality’. We evaluated the performance of SDG 15.3.1, focusing on “the proportion of land that is degraded over the total land area” for the European Union (EU) using the TRENDS.EARTH software.
This is a only first attempt to assess Land Degradation for the EU-27, in the context of the UN SDG 15.3.1. As new data and new knowledge will become available, updates could be made to this current output.
This dataset covers 9 maps associated to the assessment of the land degradation indicator at EU scale in the context of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 15.3.1, and corresponding to the output reported in a peer-reviewed publication. The main map is the one that expresses land degradation on the basis of soil organic carbon and soil erosion values.
https://esdac.jrc.ec.europa.eu/content/un-sustainable-development-goal-…